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Chris (Mr. Big) Noth shows another dimension
By Jonathan Storm
Inquirer ColumnistChris Noth. Does not rhyme with moth. Does rhyme with growth, which can be tough if you're already Big.
"It's becoming too much," he says in an interview here, where he has come to promote his new TNT movie, Bad Apple, which premieres at 9 p.m. tomorrow. "I feel I'm too much in the crosshairs of too many people's eyes. They call out to me on the street, 'I'll always see you as Mr. Big.' "
Big has become a cultural phenomenon, the love of the life of darling Carrie, the lead in Sex and the City, whose HBO finale next Sunday has driven the masses (or at least a vocal, visible and demographically significant segment thereof) loony in anticipation. Nobody knows how it finishes. Three endings were filmed. Most fans hope Carrie will sail off with Big.
"I'm just an actor," Noth says. "What do they want from me?"
Actually, Noth is more than an actor in Bad Apple, an unusual and appealing romp in the world of crime and the FBI. He obtained rights to the novel by Anthony Bruno, and is executive producer as well as star of the movie that answers the age-old question:
Can a film featuring a point-blank execution and a woman crushed in a car compactor be funnier than 90 percent of TV sitcoms?
The answer is yes.
If The Sopranos were a comedy, it would be something like Bad Apple.
It stars Noth as not-so-upstanding FBI undercover agent Mike Tozzi, X-Files guy Robert Patrick as a psycho loan shark named Tommy Bells, Star Trek's Colm Meaney as a federal agent with a toothache, Mercedes Ruehl as his Princeton professor wife, and Elliott Gould as a North Jersey mob boss everyone calls "Buddha" - but not to his face.
Tozzi's out to get Buddha and Bells, but, more important, to get tight with the hot sister of small-time informant "Freshy" Defresco, busted for selling a hijacked load of breast implants.
It seems mysterious when the no-nonsense Bells fronts Freshy $32,000, but Buddha knows why. "You want to check the cleaning instructions in his sister's pants."
This not-so-romantic triangle, with Dagmara Dominczyk as Gina Defresco, can come to no good. But Tozzi's disappointment is no worse than that of Bells, an expert in making bodies disappear, when he discovers that his trusty chain saw has popped a sprocket.
"The stakes are real," Noth says. "People can and do get killed in this movie.
"But people are funny. You go into the Blarney Stone or the Old Town Bar [noted down-to-earth Manhattan watering holes], you meet characters in real life that are funnier than most fiction, and somehow Bruno was able to capture that uniqueness and that spirit."
If the movie - interiors filmed in Montreal, exteriors in New Jersey and New York City - does well, Noth and TNT have an arrangement to make five more Bruno novels.
"I can't wait for Hollywood to decide to put me in a movie. Time's a-wasting. If I find something good, I've got to grab at it."
It may seem a strange position for a man who has done more than 20 movies and made his mark for five years with millions of admirers as Mike Logan in Law & Order, even before he became the well-endowed object of affection of millions more as Sex and the City's Big.
Noth says, "I do wish sometimes when I do theater that those roles wouldn't interfere with people's perception of my stage work." He's a graduate of the Yale School of Drama who has no trouble with romantic sexy-guy roles even though he'll turn 50 in November.
"I always like to do a play," says Noth. He has appeared off Broadway and on, notably in a 2000 revival of Gore Vidal's The Best Man with Michael Learned and Spalding Gray. "I'm interested in Vidal's new play about the Civil War."
Noth's father died when he was 8. After that, he was raised by his mother, pioneering CBS News foreign correspondent Jeanne Parr, until he entered offbeat Marlboro College in Vermont, where he built and lived in his own cabin in the woods. Now, he's a bachelor in New York, where he owns a nightclub called the Cutting Room.
He has appeared in tons of TV movies, most recently playing dashing Gen. Pompey in TNT's Caesar togafest. He has done mainstream movies (The Glass House and Cast Away) and indies (Searching for Paradise and Getting to Know You, nominated for the grand jury prize at 1999's Sundance Film Festival). He'll play a baseball executive in Bernie Mac's coming feature Mr. 3000.
"I'm an actor that comes out of the theater, and I love to tell different stories through different characters. I love that character, Mr. Big, and it was a great, fun thing, and, for me, a departure in many ways.
"Sex and the City is such a huge phenomenon, an unnaturally huge one, to my mind. It has taken me aback. It has taken my breath away how much people are investing in that show.
"It's too much. Get that camera away from me."
Which sounds like something Gould, playing Buddha in beat-up porkpie hat and oversized glasses with huge frames, would say in Bad Apple. Almost everybody has a look that's menacing and unexpectedly amusing. Patrick, Arnold Schwarzenegger's shape-shifting nemesis in Terminator 2, plays Bells with perfectly coiffed bleached-blond hair and gold-tinted glasses that advertise that there's trouble underneath.
"The movie and the acting of it was fun," Noth says, "but there were some moments that were kind of painful, like when we were chained together."
You'll have to watch to see who was chained and what they did.
"I hope that whatever I do," Noth adds, "that people see it with fresh eyes, and not with eyes of an old show that for me is long over."
For the audience, Sex and the City isn't over yet. But anyone watching Noth's Mike Tozzi - sloppy, crass, inept and funny - may have trouble remembering the suave, romantic, seemingly unattainable Big.
"First, I was Mr. Law & Order," Noth says. "And then I was Mr. Big. I guess now I'll be Mr. Tozzi."